Sweet Home 3D Blog

...and many new features described in version history were added. Here are the most important new features:

Alignment shortcut

First, if you're a regular user of Sweet Home 3D, please note that the shift shortcut key used to toggle magnetism in the plan, was replaced by the alt key under Windows, the cmd key under Mac OS X or the shift + alt keys under Linux. From now on, the shift key is used to keep the alignment along horizontal and vertical axes during object moves with the mouse in the plan, like in many drawing software. It can be combined with the duplication key (ctrl key or alt under Mac OS X), but disables magnetism.

New options in preferences

The preferences pane offers 2 new options and 2 updated options:

The Unit radio buttons were replaced by a drop drow list where the Inch unit was renamed as Foot/Inch/Fraction and the new Inch/Decimals unit was added. The Foot/Inch/Fraction unit was also changed to always display the closest eighth inch fraction for lengths shown in the furniture table and in the plan, and the closest value in square feet for areas. On the contrary, the Inch/Decimals unit always displays decimals of an inch for lengths shown in the furniture table and in the plan, and for areas in square feet.

Foot/Inch/Fraction unit

Inch/Decimals unit

When enabled, the new Aerial view centered on selection option will center the 3D aerial view on the selected items in the 2D plan. If no item is selected, the aerial view will be centered on the center of the home, the same way as if this option wasn't enabled. Note also that in Aerial view mode, the height of the home center is now set at half height of the visible items in the 3D view.

The New walls pattern in plan option sets the pattern used for walls created afterwards. It replaces the previous Walls pattern in plan option, because it's possible now to set a different pattern on each wall in the plan.

When selected, the new Check updates at program launch option will check whether some updates of Sweet Home 3D are available or not, each time the program is launched. It checks also if some updates of SH3F/SH3T/SH3L/SH3P files are available, depending on how they are configured. If some updates are available, a dialog box showing them will be displayed.

This dialog box displays also a Do not display these updates again option shown only at program launch, that avoids you to get the same updates again at next launch, in case you didn't install them meanwhile. If you select the check box, the updates dialog will appear again only when newer updates are available or when you click on the Check now button. Of course, as this new feature retrieves the information from sweethome3d.com web server, it can work only if you have an Internet connection.

More color options for walls

A new Pattern and color of the top section was added to wall modification pane.

As the following image shows, it lets you choose the pattern used to fill each wall in the plan, as well as the color used for its top part in the 3D view.

To simplify the process of coloring the sides of the walls surrounding a room, a new Wall sides around room section was also added to the room modification pane.

If necessary, this section provides a Recompute walls option that will automatically split walls spreading along other nearby rooms, if it's selected.

Not recomputed walls

Recomputed walls

New option to change furniture materials

Until previous versions, it was possible to change the color or the texture of a whole piece of furniture. Now, the furniture modification pane proposes also a new Materials option that will let you replace each color or texture of a piece by the one of your choice. This should greatly enlarge the customization possibilities for the furniture designed by contributors of Sweet Home 3D and others.

The Furniture materials dialog box displays a 3D preview of the color and texture choices you'll make while it's opened. As the materials may have not some clear names (like Line67_10 instead of countertop or Box522_4 instead of doors), it should be helpful to test colors and textures. The Materials option will be available when you edit only one piece of furniture, but to help you choose a color and reuse the same colors in other pieces of furniture, the color choice dialog box was also improved with more palettes, a pipette and a list of the most recently used colors.

New options for 3D points of view

The new 3D view > Create photos at points of view will let you select all the points of view where you want to create some photos in a batch.

The Create photos at points of view dialog box will let you choose the size and format of the computed images, as well as their image quality. These images will be saved in the folder you'll have to choose when you click on the Create button. At the two best quality levels, the date/time and lens used for a given rendered point of view will be the values you set in the Create photo dialog box at the moment you stored that point of view.

To let you maintain a clean list of points of view, the 3D view > Delete points of view menu item was added too. It will show the list of points of view stored in home to let you select the ones you want to delete.

Running Sweet Home 3D with Java 7 under Mac OS X

As the day when Apple will drop support for Java 6 in Mac OS X seems to approach, I made some efforts to make Sweet Home 3D work with Oracle's Java 7: I tested the current Java 3D 1.6 Beta version with Sweet Home 3D successfully, found some workarounds for some issues in the Mac OS X implementation of Java 7, but some remaining bugs like the lack of support for accentuated letters in file paths, convinced me to wait a next round before releasing Sweet Home 3D with Java 7 support for Mac OS X. Thus, except for the Online version where Java 7 is accepted (otherwise users unable to reset Java 6 wouldn't be able to use it), Java 6 is still required to run the program under this system, something that should be not a problem for the installer version at this time.

Finally, I'd like to thank Wuteh and presenta nova who accepted to finance some of these improvements and share them with the community.

I hope these new features will help you to customize faster and better your future home.

Re: Sweet Home 3D 4.0

Real glad for your amazing software, i use it for progect some modify in my house, since versions 1.5... It's nise to see every update or new function... I use it on linux (mint) and work as a charm...